Public management: What do we know? what should we know? and how will we know it?

The field of public management draws on a rich and varied trove of intellectual resources. Applying scholarship and imagination, its students can recognize, interpret, and predict the reality of managing governmental organizations with considerable acuity. If the field is to advance, however, researchers must do more than reverently assemble and digest practice wisdom. More emphasis must be placed on disciplined, theory-based inquiry.     

How we are,or how we say that we are: The post-war comparative politics of Hans Daadler and others

This article reviews Comparative EuropeanPolitics: The Story of a Profession (London: Pinter1997 and 1999), edited by Hans Daalder, one of thefathers of contemporary comparative politics. Such avolume is the collection of the autobiographies ofalmost all the major scholars of comparative Europeanpolitics during the post-war period. It can beconsidered a non tedious way of getting a picture ofthe sub-field. What is the European comparativepolitics that emerges from these autobiographies? Inreviewing the book the answer is provided through theanalysis of four main features: first, what are thethemes and methods that prevail; second, is itpossible to single out the factors which form thebasis of the growth in the field? – a question Daalderalso asks; third, what are the ``lessons'' to be learntfrom these scholars; and fourth, what are the mostevident and noteworthy differences that exist betweenthe work of the scholars who wrote a contribution forthis book and those of the younger generations.

     

Health care reform now

He has written articles on war and public opinion, research methodology, and computer simulations of urban and political processes. He is editor of A Handbook of Social Science Methods.     

Health care reform now

The online version of the original article can be found at     

Metaphor and social action: how worker attention is translated into capital

Using the example of attention, this paper argues that there is a tendency to treat conceptual metaphors as representational resources at the expense of critically examining how they are implicated in the material structuring of social action. Rather than understanding metaphor in terms of transference, it is proposed that the concept of translation be applied to how we theorise the workings of metaphor. By translating rather than merely transferring concepts from one domain to another, metaphors function as semiotic materialisations that give structure to social action. It is through metaphor that human attentional processes are made to be translated into the material practices of knowledge work under cognitive capitalism. However, for attention to be translated from cognitive process into labour more than a simple associative process must take place. The attention-as-labour metaphor does not just transform how we think about work, it lends itself to transforming how work is performed and managed. In this way, as discursive resources metaphors participate in the constitution not only of our understanding of social realities but also how we build and act within those realities. Thus, metaphors are not just evidence of asymmetries in power relations but also function as instruments of those asymmetries.     

Health care expenditures: international comparisons, 1970-80

This article is based on the findings of a study developed to compare health care costs in the United States during 1970-80 with those of six other industrially advanced countries--Canada, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Although health care expenditures in the United States have traditionally been relatively high, as a share of gross national product, they were exceeded in 1980 in West Germany and Sweden and equaled by the Netherlands. All the countries experienced increases in health care spending that outpaced inflation in other sectors of the economy. For the decade as a whole, the United States encountered a slower rate of growth than most of the other countries, both in terms of actual expenditures and when adjusted for inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index. As the decade progressed, however, most of the other countries succeeded in slowing their rate of increase to a greater degree than did the United States. The data also suggest that wage inflation was less of a factor in raising the cost of health care in the United States than was the case in most of the other countries.